For the Love of Money

  “Who are you to talk about doing things ‘the right way,’ Ms. Flyy?” she asked me with a laugh. “Really, Tracy, I have a lot of phone calls to make this morning. I’ll catch back up with you later on in the week.”

  “Okay, okay, just answer me this: Do your parents know yet?” I asked her.

  “They were the first people I called this morning.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Tracy, please. I believe I’ve earned all of the respect in the world from my parents. They know that I wouldn’t make any decisions at this point in my life without thinking about it. So they said, ‘Congratulations, let’s get this wedding under way, and we can’t wait for our first grandchild.’”

  I hung up with my girl Raheema in slow motion. I felt like a fool again. That girl sat there and told me to go and chase some Hollywood dream, knowing good and well that she was getting good and steamy with the real thing all along. All of a sudden, it felt like I was the last person to graduate into real life. There I was out in Hollywood going to jive-ass networking parties, while my next-door neighbor and lifelong friend was back in New Jersey living a real life, with a real man, and had a wedding and baby on the way.

  I was all the way up and feeling outraged!

  “SHIT!” I hollered at my empty walls. “Is this shit really worth it?” I asked myself. “Thanks, Raheema! Thanks a fuckin’ lot! I feel just great now!”

  I stood up, grabbed my robe off the bed, and walked toward my balcony to sit outside and think while a few early morning cars drove by.

  It took a while to come to my senses about things, but I figured that I couldn’t turn back. I was barely getting started. How much of a fool would I look like if I did turn back so soon?

  I said, “Well, I made my new bed out here in California, so I guess I have to sleep in it.”

  The 4th of July

  It must be a holiday

  with firecrackers

  and blazing colors

  streaking through the night.

  It must be a barbecue

  with fire on the grill,

  burning wings and ribs

  while little cousins play dodge ball.

  It must be a revolution,

  bringing power to the people

  with raised black fists,

  Dashikis, and Afros

  It must be a celebration,

  giving the crowd a reason to cheer

  and go nuts,

  shouting and blowing car horns.

  It must be someone big,

  like Will Smith,

  Oprah Winfrey,

  or Michael Jordan in town.

  But all of this commotion for me?

  Somebody must be pulling my damn leg!

  Now please, let me go.

  I have work to do.

  Copyright © 2000 by Tracy Ellison Grant

  April 2000

  I got up at my parents’ house and took a shower at five o’clock in the morning so I could be dressed and ready for the morning news on NBC with Steve Levy by six-thirty. When I stepped out from the shower with my towel wrapped around me, my father nearly gave me a heart attack. He was standing out in the hallway in his pajamas waiting for me.

  I jumped up in the air and squeezed my shoulders, yelping like a bimbo in a horror movie. “Damn, Dad! What are you doing out here?!” I shouted at him.

  He smiled and laughed at me. “I just wanted to catch you before you left this morning, since I didn’t get a chance to catch you last night.”

  I smiled and said, “Yeah, I heard you and Mom in the room last night, doing whatever you two were doing in there.”

  He chuckled and said, “You should have held your ears then.”

  “It wasn’t as if I was trying to hear,” I told him. I was embarrassed by it to tell the truth. Imagine coming home at night and hearing your parents inside of their room going at it. I guess riding around in the new SUV made them feel like newlyweds again.

  “I just wanted to thank you for my birthday present, and to tell you not to take what I said personal,” my father said.

  I grinned and shook my head. “I wasn’t going to sweat that, Dad. It would have worn off eventually, but I was pissed about it though. I’m not even gonna stand here and lie about that.”

  “So, I hear you have a busy morning today.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I do. I have Steve Levy, and then Mary Mason after that.”

  He grimaced and asked, “Mary Mason? Are you ready for her? She’s pretty tough.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I told him.

  I never listened to Mary Mason myself. She was on AM radio. The only time I could remember listening to AM radio was during the Lady B Show, all the way back in the early eighties when rap music was just getting started.

  “You make sure you watch what you say on her show, and remember to respect your elders,” my father warned me.

  I laughed and said, “Okay.”

  He said, “I’m serious.”

  He was only making me nervous about it.

  “Okay, Dad. Thanks a lot. Now can I get dressed, please?”

  “Oh, sure. Don’t let me hold you up. Your fans are waiting for you. I’m only your father.”

  I looked at him and shook my head. “Men,” I said, “just have to make the world revolve around y’all.”

  “Well, you know what they say: You can’t live with us, but ya surely can’t live without us,” he boasted playfully.

  I stared at him and asked, “Well, what have I been doing then?” I had never lived with a man in my life.

  “Thawing out in a cave,” my father answered me. “And as soon as you’re finished thawing out, you’re gonna step right out into the sunshine to meet yourself a nice man.”

  I couldn’t believe my father had even said something like that. The nerve of that goodnatured, fifty-one-year-old father of mine to still have such chauvinism.

  I shook my head and walked back into my room. I guess men just take their pinheaded views on sex and relationships to the grave. However, I couldn’t get an Amen on that from my mother that morning, because she was obviously still in dreamland from my father’s handiwork the night before. To be dead honest with myself, I wished that I had someone to make me late for my interviews. Late, and good and happy about it too. So I guess my father knew a little something about women after all.

  $ $ $

  I love how peaceful it is to drive in the morning time before traffic gets thick. I hit Lincoln Drive and made it over to NBC on City Line Avenue in ten minutes. I arrived early and sat in the green room, tempted to drink a cup of coffee.

  “You mean to tell me that you don’t have a bodyguard with you?” the young weatherman joked with me. I didn’t remember his name.

  I sat in my mint green suit, brand-new stockings, and mint green shoes (that matched my suit perfectly), and smiled at him, with my legs crossed like a lady.

  “How much would you charge me for it?” I flirted with him.

  He laughed it off. “Ah, I don’t think that my wife would like any price that I would charge you. I don’t even think she would feel comfortable with me mentioning your name.”

  “Does she know who I am?” I was curious. I kept second-guessing how much white Americans followed black American stardom.

  He smiled and said, “Oh yeah, she knows who you are. We saw the movie together out at Plymouth Meeting.”

  “And what did she say about the movie?”

  “Ah, let’s just say she needed some TLC that night to make her feel a little more secure.”

  I bet that many married white women who saw Led Astray and had a type A husband (the executive class) needed some TLC indeed with the prospect of a young and sexy black woman out to ruin their husbands’ personal lives for her own business sake. Call me a devil’s advocate, but that was my favorite spin of the movie.

  I smiled at the weatherman and said, “You tell your wife that it was only Hollywood.”

  “Are you kidding me?
I can’t even tell my wife that you were on this show.”

  “She doesn’t watch?”

  “Not all of the time.”

  I watched him put too much sugar in his coffee. Did I make him nervous?

  I smiled and said, “You better watch that sugar before you catch a real sweet tooth.”

  He caught himself and frowned. “Jesus, look at me. I may as well mix it with two cups now,” he commented with a boyish grin.

  I guess I did make the weatherman nervous. I laughed at it and got myself ready for Steve, who was already on the air. When he received a break, he came out and led me back to the studio.

  “Have you gotten your next movie deal yet?” he asked me. I wasn’t in town to promote anything, I was just doing a bunch of homecoming interviews, so Steve was looking for an angle. He was straight business, dark haired in a dark suit. He looked rugged enough to have played football in his heyday, and astute enough to have been the quarterback.

  “We’re working on it,” I told him, referring to my next film deal.

  He looked me over and nodded. “I wanted to plug that in, if you had any other offers yet.”

  “Are you trying to figure out some extra questions to ask me?”

  “Well, yeah, you know, just to try a different angle if you had anything. Sometimes the straight interview can be a little flat.” He gave me another quick look after his comment. “Then again, maybe not with you,” he added with a reserved laugh.

  I smiled at him and kept my thoughts to myself. Steve was sharp and crafty, and that kept me on my good behavior with him.

  “We have another ten, fifteen minutes or so, so if you come up with anything, let me know,” he said.

  When he went back on the air for the local news, I thought about exploring the angle of the nervous white wives that Led Astray had created. However, maybe that would have been too much for the morning news, so I thought better of it. I planned to start plugging ideas about my follow-up book instead. That was safe enough territory. It was new, and it definitely would serve my purpose. So before we went on air, I shared the idea with Steve.

  He nodded. “You know we had Omar on the show with the book a few years back.”

  “Yeah, I just hope that he’s not too busy to come back to my story, you know, with the whole Philadelphia connection and everything.”

  “I see what you mean. Last I heard he was writing a story about St. Louis.”

  I nodded. “I have nothing against St. Louis, but I do think that we need a follow up on me, if I can say so myself.”

  He nodded again, agreeing to it. “All right, we can talk about that. That would entail your whole Hollywood story, wouldn’t it? I’m sure that plenty of people would be interested in that.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” I told him, and it was on.

  We walked up to the set to get wired for the microphones and got ready for the countdown.

  “Three, two, one,” the line producer sounded off. The light from the camera flashed to red, for live, and Steve went straight into his business.

  “Good morning again, Philadelphia. Our guest this morning is a local girl turned star, like in Hollywood. The leading actress from the recent hit movie Led Astray was born and raised right here in the Germantown area, and graduated from our local Germantown High School. We welcome Tracy Ellison Grant.”

  The cameras swung on me and went to red.

  “Well, is it good to be back home?” Steve asked me.

  I smiled real good for the camera and made my opening remarks. “Well, it’s good, but I can’t say that it’s been all good. Although it has definitely been busy.”

  “Have you gone down to South Street for a good old-fashioned Philly cheese steak yet?”

  I laughed. “Not yet, but it’s on my list.”

  “What about a movie with Will Smith? Have you brainstormed anything like that? That would surely be a hit in these parts with both of you guys in it.”

  I played along with him. “Yeah, and we can hook up with Boyz II Men, Lisa Lopes, Jazzy Jeff and Kurupt, The Roots and Jill Scott, and put them all on the sound track and make it an all-Philadelphia thing, right? That would be a blast!”

  Steve said, “It sounds like a plan to me. Now, what many people are just realizing is that you had a book based on your life as a teenager growing up in Germantown, written and published a few years ago by another Philadelphian, Omar Tyree. And I believe that the book,Flyy Girl, is still a hot seller. Now how much of that book is actually you?” he asked me with a grin.

  I smiled back at him and answered. “All of it. And at first I had a hard time dealing with the responses that some people had to my carefree youth. But now that I’ve straightened up my act and made it out in Hollywood, I’m actually looking forward to writing a sequel with Omar. I want to give people the full scoop on how a local girl from Philly made it out in Hollywood, wrote her own script, helped to produce it,and starred in it.”

  I was tooting my own horn,loudly, but what the hell. That was what I was there to do.

  Steve looked with wide eyes, playing it up, and said, “Well, you’re not looking to go into the news business are you? I’ll have to protect my job around here.”

  I chuckled and said, “Your job is safe, Steve. I don’t have any plans for the broadcast news. I just want to finish up on the news about my life for all of the fans who know only half of the story right now.”

  “So, are you negotiating with Omar? Is it a done deal?” he asked me.

  “We’re still at the table right now, but I’m getting a little anxious about the hesitation, so hopefully we’ll sign the agreeable paperwork and get this thing started real soon.”

  “Well, I can’t wait for that, and I’m sure that I speak for thousands of your fans, especially here in the Philadelphia area,” Steve added on cue. “Do you have a title for us yet?”

  “Ah, not yet, but I’ll be sure to let you know when the time comes. I think the most important thing right now is just getting the deal done and letting the people know about it.”

  “And what about other movie projects?”

  “Other movie scripts are in the works as well, and I’ll be sure to keep my hometown abreast of everything that I do.”

  When the lights flashed off from live, Steve said, “That was great! We rolled right on through it!”

  “Yeah, that’s what I hoped would happen with this book contract.”

  “What exactly is in the way? The money?” he asked me.

  I frowned and said, “It’s not really the money. Omar just has this thing about the audience. He’s trying to go after older readers, and my book,Flyy Girl, attracted a lot of younger readers, who have been sharing books instead of buying them.”

  Steve smiled and said, “Ooohhh, so it is the money.”

  I said, “I don’t look at it that way, Steve. Young people have the money for a book. They just have to want it, and we never really marketed my book to young people in the first place, because the assumption was that they didn’t read.”

  “I see. Well,Flyy Girl proved that assumption wrong, huh?”

  “Exactly. That’s why we have to come back to it. The proof will be in the sequel.”

  $ $ $

  I stepped out of the NBC studio and felt like I was walking on air that morning. I couldn’t get too carried away with it though. I still had to drive down the street to do WHAT-AM with Mary Mason for an eight o’clock show. Their studio was seven to ten blocks down the road, and right past WDAS-FM. City Line Avenue was media city in Philadelphia!

  I arrived at 54th Street at WHAT early as well, and walked up to their second-floor offices. I even had time to stop off for a donut and orange juice, and after having such a good show with Steve Levy that morning, I was no longer nervous about Mary Mason.

  I was introduced to her in her office before air time. She looked up at me from her crowded desk, with big hair, full body, and plenty of zest in her eyes. She said, “So, what did your daddy say about you
taking your clothes off for that movie, Tracy?” Her young producer broke out laughing and started shaking her head. I guess she was used to Mary Mason’s in-your-face candor, and still shocked by it at the same time.

  Mary reminded me of an aunt, the one who still smokes, curses, and goes to church every Sunday for forgiveness, just so she can tell everyone else what they’re doing wrong in their lives. You couldn’t tell Mary Mason that to her face though, because then you’d have a fight on your hands. Nevertheless, the people in Philadelphia loved her, because she had that Philadelphian fire to tell it like it was no matter what. Just like me.

  I smiled and said, “You can ask me that on the air. I’m sure that everyone else would like to know too.”

  She didn’t budge an inch. She grunted at me and said, “Did you like doing it?”

  “Not necessarily,” I told her. “I wasn’t even supposed to play the part.”

  “What part were you supposed to play?”

  “I just wrote the movie, actually. Then things just started to happen in other ways to get the project done.”

  “Project? Is that what you call it?”

  “That’s what it’s called when it’s not done.”

  “You plan on doing anymore projects like that one?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “You plan on writing anymore like that?”

  I began to wonder what she would ask me on air with so many rapid-fire questions in her office.

  “Hopefully, I can extend my range into other vehicles like Sharon Stone was able to do. Or Julia Roberts and Glenn Close.”

  “You plan on doing any black movies?”

  When she asked me that I just stared at her. This is going to be a long damn interview, I told myself.

  “Black movies, meaning what, an all-black cast?” I asked her.

  “A movie that means something,” she answered.

  “You think any of these movies mean something nowadays?” I asked her back. “Hollywood only makes what the people want to watch. So if we really wanted movies that meant something, we would watch more of them. I don’t think Will Smith has made a movie that meant something for black people yet, outside of the fact that he makes twenty million dollars a movie now.”